- 08-16-2025, 01-46-28.png (41.89 KiB) Viewed 136 times
I then tried to find some other alternative way through which one could possibly be able to set up an interrupt:
- maybe i need to click on the train stop and set it up there? no, that's not it...
- hm, i think i once did a small interactive tutorial on how train schedules work? maybe there's a similar one for interrupts? okay, no, there isn't one
- maybe i'm misunderstanding how this is supposed to work. let me google it... oh, there's the FFF about interrupts... okay, it's being described exactly how i would expect it to.
- wait, what's the text field for? is that search? wait, no, it can't be search, there's a separate button to bring up a checkbox...
- let me just type in some random text and see what happens
- oohhh, that's how it's supposed to work
Since the gold standard for determining usability is watching how new users interact with a piece of UI, I can't claim to know for sure how to fix this, but I have some ideas that are, IMHO, quite likely to improve it, in ways that will hopefully prove uncontroversial.
1. Firstly, the fact that the "No interrupts found." banner is red is probably a major contributing factor to the confusion. I assume that this is because it shares the styling with the "No Stations found" banner [note the inconsistent capitalization, btw], for which a red color makes sense, since there it is an actual error. I would suggest changing the color of the "No interrupts found." banner to something neutral, like gray.
1a. Relatedly, the banner text could also reworded to sound less like an error, e.g. "No existing interrupts". The use of the word "existing" should also subtly suggest that the UI also deals with interrupts that aren't yet existing, i.e. that it's the right place to add an interrupt.
2. Secondly, the textbox could use some placeholder text, like "Create interrupt..." or "New interrupt..." (think <input placeholder=blah> in HTML), to make sure that the textbox isn't misread as being for something else, such as filtering down the (initially empty) list.
3. One potential improvement I could also imagine is a heading separating the textbox from the list, something like "Choose existing:". But that's a slightly more disruptive change, so I'd understand if you decided it's superfluous.
I hope that this helps you improve the UI to make it more intuitive. The fact that I bothered to write all this should hopefully give you an idea about just how confused I got, and how badly I believe that some change is needed...